Sunday, December 30, 2012

Ross Douthat has good advice...

...for all of us (especially me) in his column this morning: Next year, read stuff you wouldn't normally read. Douthat offers three specific steps you can take (my emphasis):

(1) Consider taking out a subscription to a magazine whose politics you don’t share. And whenever you’re tempted to hurl away an article in disgust, that’s exactly when you should turn the page or swipe the screen and keep on reading, to see what else the other side might have to say.

(2)  Expand your reading geographically as well as ideologically. Even in our supposedly globalized world, place still shapes perspective, and the fact that most American political writers live in just two metropolitan areas tends to cramp our ability to see the world entire.

And,

(3) Finally, make a special effort to read outside existing partisan categories entirely. Crucially, this doesn’t just mean reading reasonable-seeming types who split the left-right difference. It means seeking out more marginal and idiosyncratic voices, whose views are often worth pondering precisely because they have no real purchase on our political debates.

It's good advice for those of us who tend to stay in our own ideological bubbles. I think I'll start with The American Conservative. I've heard good things about it.

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